What I've learned since moving to D.C. (some of which should be obvious): 0081

4001.  Our only limitations are those we set up in our own minds;

4002.  Success often boils down to whether or not you believe your intelligence level is fixed or if it is something that can be improved upon;

4003.  You need to stop making excuses in every aspect of your life.  That means actually doing what you say you’re going to do.  Be an action taker not an excuse maker;

4004.  Excuses are preventers; they prevent you from accomplishing anything in life.  When you push away a spark of motivation with one of your well-rehearsed excuses, you are preventing yourself from taking action every single time.  For the rest of your life, you’re going to be faced with problems and goals.  You might as well tackle them the right way; starting with eliminating excuses from your lexicon;

4005.  Happiness is the most important thing in life.  Now what exactly happens in your life when you justify your inaction with an excuse?  You postpone your own happiness;

4006.  If you really want anything to change, comfort is the last thing you should be seeking;

4007.  When you get to the point where all you want to do is to be as successful as badly as you want to breathe, then you will be successful;

4008.  If you want to succeed in life, you have to do so much more than just be yourself.  You need to be the best version of yourself;

4009.  Motivation is a fickle thing.  It’s no different from any other emotion – valid, but utterly fleeting and wholly undependable.  Habits are reliable.  Motivation is not;

4010.  Don’t be yourself, better yourself;

4011.  The only way to improve is to try, but we’re taught to fear rejection more than we desire to succeed;

4012.  When you choose failure, you’re guaranteed to get it.  But when you choose to take action, you’re guaranteed a chance at success.  Isn’t having a chance at achieving your goals better than a guarantee that you won’t?  So stop choosing failure.  Instead, choose a chance at success;

4013.  The moment you stop, the moment you hesitate, the moment you let up and decide to just do it tomorrow, you’ve lost.  At that point, you’ve chosen failure;

4014.  Being a hard worker is important, but working hard alone will never make you wealthy;

4015.  In order to succeed, you have to be willing to fail many times;

4016.  People are very good at misleading themselves and others around them by claiming to be preparing for an opportunity.  In their minds, they are getting ready.  Unfortunately, what they are really doing is procrastinating because they are scared of what could happen if they fail.  As a result, the opportunity that presented itself usually goes away;

4017.  Self-doubt, fear and worry are the greatest obstacles to success;

4018.  Watch out for the Dermalactives saleswomen at the Fashion Centre at Pentagon City.  They’re (really) good. . . . You’ll end up buying stuff you didn’t want;

4019.  Fear is the mind-killer;

4020.  Net worth is only potential value.  It is worthless until realized, just as a person’s potential is worthless until it is realized through serving and creating value for others;

4021.  The way to bridge the gap between the potential of net worth and the productivity of cash flow is through creating value – finding ways to meet the perceived needs and wants of other people;

4022.  The myth that prosperity can be reduced to and quantified by math destroys our human life value because it is focused on the effect, rather than the cause of prosperity.  It causes people to work for money and to pursue a number on their bank balance or a calculation of net worth instead of creating value, and it leads us to make unwise decisions regarding money;

4023.  In a world of cause and effect, money is an effect while creating value for people is the cause;

4024.  Numbers on paper can’t help you understand the opportunity costs of the financial and life decisions you make;

4025.  Opportunity costs are the paths not taken, the opportunities we lose when we choose a particular course of action – what our money could have been or the experiences we could have had or the jobs we might hold had we made different choices.  When we place too much value on the numbers on our balance sheets and in our retirement accounts, we run the risk of staying in miserable and limiting situations because the numbers dangle in front of us like the proverbial carrot.  We make decisions based on how much money we can make, rather than focusing on how much value we can create for others and for ourselves.  Can you quantify the burnout that eventually hits people doing things that make them miserable, even if they make good money?  Furthermore, can you quantify the lost production that comes from people working for money instead of working to create value?

4026.  A number on a balance sheet that says $1 million is nothing but a quantity and it says nothing about the quality of life of the individual millionaire;

4027.  If our sense of happiness is based primarily on our amount of money, it is an illusory and transitory happiness at best;

4028.  Quality and quantity are fundamentally different from each other and one cannot be substituted for the other.  If we can learn to focus more on quality and less on quantity, we will be more able to utilize and maximize the productivity of any amount of money that flows to us;

4029.  Nobody wants money; they want what money can buy;

4030.  Everyone wants to be happy and it’s that desire for happiness that drives all human behavior.  Many people seem to think that happiness is a function of the amount of money that we have.  But it’s self-evident that money cannot bring us happiness.  It can certainly facilitate the purchase of items that contribute to our joy in life, but money in and of itself has no intrinsic value;

4031.  Prosperity means to be truly happy and to be free of worries and stress about money;

4032.  One of the most destructive lies that we can fall prey to is thinking that having more money will change us.  Many people fear wealth because they think it will change them for the worse and still others invite wealth because they think that it will make them happy.  The amount of currency available to you does nothing, but make you more of what you already are.  If you are naturally generous, increased wealth will simply give you greater opportunity to be generous.  If you are greedy, wealth will do nothing but manifest your greed even more clearly;

4033.  A bank balance does not have the power to change people; only people can change their understanding of and relationship with their bank balance.  If you’re not happy without money, you’ll never be happy with it.  Money is important and useful, but if you think that money will fix your problems, that thought is the problem;

4034.  Nobody is responsible for you, but you.  You are the one with the responsibility and the power to change anything about your life that you don’t like;

4035.  Great wealth can come to you only as a result of doing things you don’t want to do;

4036.  Successful people share five characteristics: 1.  They are persistent; 2.  They are patient; 3.  They are willing to handle both the “nobler and the pettier” aspects of their job; 4.  They have an increasingly noncompetitive attitude towards the people with whom they work with; and 5.  Their investment activities – aside from their main careers – consumed a minimum of their time and attention;

4037.  Investing in yourself, what you do and with whom you do it are the most important determining factors of wealth;

4038.  Security is mostly a superstition.  It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.  Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.  Life is either a daring adventure or nothing;

4039.  People are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they, therefore, remain bound;

4040.  What we know and do not act on cannot help us;

4041.  Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts;

4042.  Consumers focus on what they get instead of what they can give, they avoid responsibility, they depend on others for their happiness and they rarely create real value.  Consumers operate in scarcity, so they view the world through eyes that see poverty and limitations.  They think there isn't enough to go around, so they should get what they can before it all runs out.  They take and leave nothing in place of what they take.  They often feel victimized by other people and external circumstances when they don't get what they think they should.  They believe that material things, not people, have intrinsic value.  Because they feel entitled to everything that is given to them, they are poor stewards and allow their human life value to degenerate;

4043.  Producers know that people, not material things, have intrinsic value.  They love people and use material things to serve others.  They operate in abundance and they view the world through eyes that see limitless possibilities for value creation.  They are wise stewards over everything that they have been blessed with;

4044.  People quickly answer two questions when they first meet you: Can I trust this person?  Can I respect this person?  Psychologists refer to these dimensions as warmth and competence respectively, and ideally you want to be perceived as having both;

4045.  Most people, especially in a professional context, believe that competence is the more important factor.  After all, they want to prove that they are smart and talented enough to handle your business.  But in fact warmth or trustworthiness is the most important factor in how people evaluate you;

4046.  While competence is highly valued, it is evaluated only after trust is established;

4047.  If someone you’re trying to influence doesn’t trust you, you’re not going to get very far; in fact, you might even elicit suspicion because you come across as manipulative;

4048.  A warm, trustworthy person, who is also strong, elicits admiration, but only after you’ve established trust does your strength become a gift rather than a threat;

4049.  When you’re in a parking garage, you’re trying to turn and there’s another car blocking your way, back up and let the other car pass. . . . Your paint job (and insurance company) will thank you;

4050.  The last of the human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances – to choose one’s own way;

What I've learned since moving to D.C. (some of which should be obvious): 0080

3951.  In order to effectively utilize tapping to calm your state and regulate your emotions, you must first face whatever fear or negative memory is triggering your amygdala.  Once you have your mental focus firmly fixed on this particularly scary event, begin tapping two of the meridian points with your thumb and your index finger between 4-6 times per second.  Continue the tapping motion for 5 to 10 minutes.  As you tap, concentrate on accepting and resolving the negative emotions surrounding this particular act or event.  With focus and repetition, tapping enables individuals to come to terms with and conquer irrational fear or anxiety responses;

3952.  Over the last few decades, an abundance of research has been carried out to validate the dramatic effects of tapping.  Studies conducted at Harvard Medical School show unequivocally that the fear response initiated by the amygdala can indeed be lessened by stimulating meridian points used in acupuncture and tapping;

3953.  Another study undertaken by Dr. Dawson Church, founder of the Institute for Integrative Healthcare and editor of Energy Psychology, sought to determine how an hour-long tapping session would impact the stress levels of 83 subjects.  Dr. Church and his team measured the subjects’ cortisol levels and found an average reduction of approximately 24%.  For the test subjects, who did not undergo tapping therapy, there was no significant reduction in cortisol;

3954.  During the first 10 seconds of meeting a woman, the average male will spend more than half of the time looking at her lips;

3955.  As you grow older your Christmas list gets smaller because the things you really want can’t be bought;

3956.  Listening will help you in almost every aspect of your life.  It will make you a better leader, a better conversationalist, a better spouse, a better sales executive and it will instantly make you more likeable and the most popular person at a party;

3957.  Three things go a long way in connecting with people: 1.  Mirror people’s words; 2.  Ask questions; and 3.  Stop looking around the room;

3958.  Mirror people’s words: It sounds counterintuitive because repeating other people’s words back to them makes it seem as if you’re not paying attention to them, but people’s eyes light up when you repeat their words back to them, as in: “This app is going to revolutionize the way people order local chickens from the farm,” to which you would say, “This is going to revolutionize the way people order local chickens from the farm?  How?” to which the person would reply, “Yes!  So glad you asked . . . .” . . . You’ve made an instant friend;

3959.  Ask questions: How many conversations have you been in where someone says something completely nonsensical and you just let it pass because it’s actually more work to make them explain their point than to let her/him talk on.  Next time, make a point to stop the conversation and ask about the point of confusion.  It will not only create a more dynamic connection, it will also signal to the person that you’re actually listening.  Chances are, when you’re stuck with someone who’s talking endlessly, even s/he knows you’re not completely paying attention;

3960.  Stop looking around the room: One of the things about live television interviews is the intensity of it – two people are literally staring at each other for five minutes straight talking, sometimes tensely.  The problem is, in real life, nobody talks to each other that way.  Most of us are half engaged in our conversations, thinking about what we want to eat, our dinner plans or the work on our desk.  At cocktail parties, many of us find ourselves looking over the shoulder of the person in front of us to see who’s around.  Stop looking around the room physically or looking around the room in your brain.  Five minutes spent fully engaging with one person as if s/he is the only thing in the room at the moment is worth 10 times more than 15 minutes half-heartedly tittering on about the dullest subjects;

3961.  It seems to me that, when you’re in a relationship, sex is a big deal before you have it, but after you do, it really isn’t anymore;

3962.  Done is better than perfect.  Progress is better than perfection;

3963.  Start every morning with three “E’s:” 1.  Exercise; 2.  Education; and 3.  Enlightenment;

3964.  Are you going to let the universe affect you or are you going to affect it?

3965.  Are your beliefs serving you or are they holding you back?

3966.  Choose what you’re going to be.  Choose who you are, accept that, live that, embrace that instead of having (all of) these conditional beliefs that hold you back;

3967.  You can never have back the memories that you don’t ever have.  And if you miss out on life, you may never get a second chance;

3968.  Money is still important, but it’s only a part of the equation.  I want to know what kind of experiences I can have and what kind of quality of life can come about;

3969.  There are five tracks of wealth in life.  There’s financial.  There’s “soul” purpose.  There’s the mentality or mindset.  There’s the physical well-being.  And then there’s the social aspect, which are the relationships and the people that you want to spend time with.  The best way to have those five areas work for you is to always share and show gratitude for them.  If you can appreciate and acknowledge gratitude in those areas, if you look at every circumstance or incident as something to teach you a lesson of either what to do or what not to do, and, if you look at every person in your life as someone who’s going to be an example of what to do or what not to do, it takes away becoming a victim of circumstances, where you can instead say, “That’s a good lesson to learn.  I’m going to move forward;”

3970.  You don’t always have a choice of what the circumstances are or what happens, but you do have a choice of what you do about it;

3971.  We have thoughts that come into our mind.  We don’t control every thought that comes in, but we control which thoughts we give attention to and what we’re going to do about those thoughts;

3972.  Get absolute clarity about what it is that you find most important in life and what makes you feel important and that becomes your scorecard to work towards;

3973.  Over 83% of people don’t know both (of) their great-grandparents’ names;

3974.  If you say “yes” to everybody, then you don’t say “yes” to yourself;

3975.  If everybody is “special,” then nobody is;

3976.  Enslavement by illusion is comfortable; it is the liberation by truth that people fear;

3977.  When we say, “It sounds too good to be true,” what we really mean is that we don’t know how to do it, so we are skeptical;

3978.  There are risks and costs to a program of action.  But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction;

3979.  Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value;

3980.  People, not material things, have intrinsic value and people make individual, personal determinations of the value of material things;

3981.  The principle that exchange creates individual and community wealth implies that by continuously exchanging goods and services we can create infinite value from those goods and services.  Even if resources are finite, scarce resources plus human ingenuity, individual ideas of value and continual exchange can create infinite productivity from the available resources;

3982.  The quality of our lives is not determined by the quantity of our stuff;

3983.  If a home has intrinsic, or inherent, value, how could its market value change?

3984.  None of us value material things equally.  This means that resources are infinite according to our individual perceptions of value.  There’s no productive reason to hoard material things because we all have different desires;

3985.  We only give up something in an exchange when we value what we’re receiving more than we value what we’re giving up.  We never trade like value for like value, because we have no incentive to do so.  We trade what we have for what we actually want more;

3986.  Exchange can only occur in an atmosphere of disagreement.  In a free market, the final sale price of any object is always an amount that the seller and the buyer both disagree that the object is worth;

3987.  What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others;

3988.  If we want to have more, then we should start by being better people; in order to be better, we start doing better things, which leads to having more of what we want.  When we become who we were born to be every resource imaginable becomes available to fulfill our mission;

3989.  If we want to prosper, we must learn that happiness does not come from material things.  We must become aware that happiness comes from inside ourselves; nothing external can dictate our lasting happiness;

3990.  Taking responsibility for and shaping our beliefs and habits is the first step toward happiness and prosperity.  The irony is that the healthier our beliefs are, the more material and spiritual prosperity we will experience;

3991.  All external changes in the forms of life, not having a change of consciousness at their base, do not improve the condition of the people, but generally make it worse.  A better life can only come when the consciousness of men is altered for the better; and therefore all the efforts of those who wish to improve life should be directed to changing their own and other people’s consciousness;

3992.  When individuals bring unique skills and talents to a combined project, the total value of that project increases at a greater rate than the individual value each of those people contributed.  Through the synergy created by sharing and exchanging our full human potential, everyone benefits and becomes far wealthier than if they were to hoard their talents and energy to themselves;

3993.  The abundance paradigm helps us to see the possibility of and the value in win-win exchanges and transactions.  People who are operating in abundance know that by serving the wants and needs of others, and thus creating happiness in the lives of others, they actually bring more happiness to themselves.  The goal is to serve others, not to exploit or dominate them.  They are able to serve wholeheartedly and completely because they know that by so doing, they aren’t in any way diminishing their own happiness; in fact, they are generating more happiness and success in their own lives;

3994.  Men do not attract that which they want, but that which they are;

3995.  A Gallup survey showed that 75 percent of workers want to retire before age sixty, yet only 25 percent actually think that they will;

3996.  According to a study conducted by the U.S. Department of Commerce, only 5 percent of all Americans are financially independent at age sixty-five.  This study further indicated that 75 percent of all retirees are forced to depend on family, friends and Social Security as their only sources of income;

3997.  Fifty-one percent of retirees today have incomes below $10,000.00 per year;

3998.  Apparently, spammers take vacations too.  I seem to be getting more spam since the (beginning of the) New Year;

3999.  People are often unreasonable and self-centered.  Forgive them anyway.  If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives.  Be kind anyway.  If you are honest, people may cheat you.  Be honest anyway.  If you find happiness, people may be jealous.  Be happy anyway.  The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow.  Do good anyway.  Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough.  Give your best anyway; for you see, in the end, it is between you and God.  It was never between you and them anyway;

4000.  Life is a journey not a destination.  We determine our destiny by the direction we take;